Category: Summer 2012 Kaleidoscope

#1: Polar Bar Cafe – 15: This show… is brilliant. Oh my god, I’m nearly dying from laughing here. This show managed to surpass itself yet again. – ***+ (Amazing)

#2: Tamayura Hitotose – 05,5: One issue that i still can’t find a good solution for is how to cover OVAs. The thing is, that I want to cover these things because I’ve often noticed that they suffer from a lack of buzz and people don’t often know about them, even though there is some very good stuff amongst them. The problem though is that in my experience, it’s too much of a chore to devote a single post to all of them. What I’m still searching for is some sort of catalog or easily accessible post or page that would briefly highlight the noteworthy OVAs out there. But for now I’ll just include them in these ratings. This episode was awesome and I nearly dozed off due to how relaxing it was. This is what I mean by using ovas well: this episode showed so much about Potte and her father. Awesome. – *** (Awesome)

#3: Computer Kakumei OVA: Computar Kakumei and the below listed Marimo no Hana are two OVAs of only 10 minutes long that have a surprising amount of talent within them (heck, both directors worked on multiple episodes of the Tatami Galaxy and Kaiba among others). While this didn’t come together for Marimo no Hana, Computer Kakumei is actually quite interesting. At first it seemed a bit of a sell-out with the lead’s female’s father suddenly getting hospitalized, but there was a surprising amount of heart to it. The visuals also look very pretty, but what caught my attention the most was how good the soundtrack was.In fact, for such a short OVA… I can hardly recall any OVA of that length that had a better soundtrack other than Comedy. – ** (Excellent)

#4: Tari Tari – 02: I’m not going to blog this series for the fear that it’ll be too short to make any real impact. But still this episode impressed me with how much went on there. I thought that the entire series would revolve around getting the choir club going, but with this episode this entire subplot has been resolved already. This definitely was a significant difference from the first episode and I quite like how the creators juggled around the roles for everyone and made everyone important in trying to make the joint recital. – ** (Excellent)

#5: Hyouka – 11,5: Again, I’ve gotten a bit tired about devoting full entries to OVA episodes like this, so I’ll just list this one here. It’s a pool episode, and while it’s not a very good pool episode (remove the pool part and this episode still would have been able to make the points it wanted to make), it is quite worth watching, if only for what they did to Oreki’s character and his boredom here. – *+ (Great)

#6: Binbou-Gami ga! – 02 – Unfortunately, this is as I expected: this episode was not as good as the first, by far. The new character introduced is just an overblown unfunny stereotype and this episode flowed far from as smoothly. On top of that, a majority of the jokes was very forced and fell rather flat. This is a bad sign. – (Enjoyable)

#7: Hunter X Hunter – 38: This episode only featured the same exposition I’ve already seen before. So yeah, I found this really boring, but it’s good to have all this set-up over with now; this part was even longer and more annoying back in the 1999 series. – – (Disappointing)

#8: Marimo no Hana – OVA: So, AKB0048 is currently very good. Interestingly, this 10-minute OVA is an example of how not to use them. Two of its members basically voice the main male and female. And the male one sounds like a girl. I mean, totally, without any question. And really, I’m not blaming the girls here, the producer here should have known that you can’t just throw idols everywhere and expect this to work out, and this really was a cheap cash-in with no thought put into it whatsover. Which is a darn shame, because this OVA has a bunch of really good animators working on it. – – (Disappointing)

#9: Yuruyuri 02 – 02: When I watch a comedy, I want to watch something that makes me laugh. Not something that dabbles on randomly while trying to annoy me. Dropped. – — (Lacking)

#10: La Storia della Arcana Famiglia – 02: I checked Amazon. And I could only find 6 DVD volumes listed, meaning that it’ll be highly likely that this show will only have 12 episodes. For that, it’s goofing off way too much, there is too little happening: go back to fun action scenes instead of having bishies talk to each other trying to act quirky while saving kittens. Dropped. – — (Lacking)

#11: Phi Brain – 39: Why, Phi Brain? Why!? There was so much wrong with this episode it’s not even funny. Why did you decide to bring back the single most pathetic villain of the first season? Why did you find it a good idea to bring back such a comically evil bad guy? Why did you kidnap Elena without involving Gammon in this at all? Did you entirely forget the romantic hints that the first season was building up to? Why did you take Nonoha instead? Why did she end up partaking into part of the puzzle now of all times, in which she was absolutely useless? Why didn’t you give her something to redeem herself with? Why did you make Rook appear from out of nowhere? Why did Rook’s helper arrive just at the right time? Why did they know about a kidnapping that even Cubic wasn’t aware of? Why did you suddenly introduce two game players, even though the Orpheus Order people have up till now always battled the main cast directly? There are just so many things about this series now that make no sense whatsoever from a storytelling perspective. It’s like this series WANTS to ruin itself or something. — (Bad)

#12: Campione- 02: I dropped this about 4 minutes into the episode, in which this show revealed itself as a harem, the lead female completely changed character and the male lead’s sister got jealous at her. —- (Terrible)

So yeah, this season I’m going to continue ranking the shows that I’m not blogging from best to worst. The format will be pretty much the same, although I’m not going to include Poyopoyo anymore. In terms of writing about 2-minute episodes, my inspiration has run out for that. However, if I haven’t made this clear by now: check this series out, because in terms of relatable slice of life you really can’t get any better than this.

#1: Shirokuma Cafe – 14: The premise of this episode was crazy. Both halves were; a polar bear and a penguin visiting the bech is already surreal enough on its own, but the first half of this episode really tole the show. It’s based on an idea so stupid that nobody tries it anymore. And here this show comes and goes with it. – **+ (Excellent+)

#2: Alice in the Country of Hearts: I’m not going to make an entry out of this, but I do want to say that against my expectations after finding out that this was yet another reverse harem with a ton of bishies, I really enjoyed this one. It has made not making any sense into an art form. Characters really appear from out of bloody nowhere and things jump from one place to the other without any explanation whatsoever, even for the standards of something based on Alice in Wonderland. But the charactrs are fun an interesting, the dialogue was surprisingly good, the music was used really well. This really had the charms that originally made me a fan of the shoujo genre. *+ (Great)

3#: Hunter X Hunter – 37: This was the first time in which I’ll admit: this episode was significantly better than its counterpart in the 1999 series. the 1999 version at this point was t its dullest point: so much build-up had passed, and things still didn’t look like they were picking up. this version though, is different. Ging’s background was done much better, and the whole lay-out of this story flowed much more. Also, what do you mean that this story is 13 years old? I’m curious to my younger readers: did you actually recognize those cassette tapes? – *+ (Great)

#4: Saint Seiya Omega – 14: This week’s episode was actually very good, the way in which it used someone from Saori’s past and delved more into it. The plot is also finally moving, but do you really meant to say that they still need to collect four more of those goddamn crystals before they can face the big boss? – *+ (Great)

#5: Phi Brain – 38: Jikugawa was one of the few characters who wasn’t affected by the past degeneration arc so his part in this episode was very god. However, now that my suspense of disbelief has been broken I’m starting to notice other thing. For example how empty the school is: Ana and Nonoha were supposed to evacuate the entire building, and yet we only saw one other person. It’s important to populate your world, people. – *+ (Great)

#6: Kokoro Connect – 01 – Part B: So I was surprised over all of teh feedback that I judged this series too early, so I at least figured to check out the second half of this episode… and right after the point where the first half left ff a crazy lesbian appeared from out of nowhere and started groping the girlIs this really common behavior? In any case, afterwards things got better and I may have been a bit too harsh rating this with 0% potential, but I still don’t really like how the dialogue is too tatic, or how random this show is: there is no point to these gender changes: theey’re just there for no reason whatsoever and unlike Natsuiro Kiseki there is no context behind it. What this show was very good at was describing the slice of life situations for the cast after they left school, but I really don’t want to see more of this show if it’s just going to base itself of unfunny perverted jokes. – — (Lacking)